Two men on stage: similar heights, similar complexions, slightly different builds, dressed exactly the same. Brothers, right? So we forgive their rough-housing. After all, aren't those pajama bottoms they're both wearing? Boys will be boys. Even when they grow into men and the horseplay turns more physical and the spelling of who plays victor and who victim is starkly represented for us in one standing over the prone body of another. It's nothing we haven't seen in MMA.
But what happens if you dress those boys up as girls? How do we read the sibling violence then? What kind of statements about gender and patriarchy are we being asked to contemplate? Such are the questions that form the heart of Cain and Abel, a new work of dance-theatre by The Biting School's Arash and Aryo Khakpour that is on at the Firehall Arts Centre through this evening.
It makes sense that the brothers Khakpour are drawn to the Biblical story of fratricide. Purely at a meta level, it allows them to explore--in highly physical and theatrical ways--both the differences and the overlaps in their respective training as dance artist (Arash) and theatre performer (Aryo). Professionally each has regularly crossed over into the other's discipline, and so I can imagine that over the years there have been more than a few conversations about who has booked a show and who hasn't. And yet, not withstanding individual set pieces and the structuring motif of repetition, this is not only a work about one-upmanship. For this particular take on Cain and Abel also happens to be read through Jean Genet's classic play about sisterly and sadomasochistic role-playing, The Maids.
At a certain point in the piece, having divided the stage in half with a bucket of stones, Arash and Aryo find themselves upstage, whereupon they enact for us the aforementioned victor/victim scenario, each taking turns lying under or standing over the other as they slowly move across the stage. Thereafter they remove their pajama bottoms and trainers and fetch from the clothes line in front of them the various accoutrements of a French maid's outfit: black pantyhose, black dress, white apron, and pick plastic gloves. What follows is a condensed--and, I must say, exceedingly compelling--run-through of the basic plot of Genet's play, with the object of the sisters' murderous fantasies, Madame, nicely represented by a white dress that descends from the ceiling.
But what could have been a confused mash-up of different stories of sibling rivalry is elevated to a timely comment on gendered violence by the repetition of the physical vocabulary that anchored the first half of the piece. All of sudden when we see one of the brothers/sisters lying prone on the floor with her skirt hiked above her waist we are reminded that women pay an unequal price for men's compensatory anxieties about how they measure up against each other. We have only to look at what the jockeying of a certain fraternity of male politicians is accomplishing south of the border this weekend to understand this, and as such the message of this bold work of hybrid performance couldn't be more relevant.
P
Showing posts with label Aryo Khakpour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aryo Khakpour. Show all posts
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Edge 3 at DOTE
Last night's Edge 3 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was made up of three solos by three Vancouver artists/companies who like to explore the porous boundaries between dance, theatre and performance/installation art.
First up was dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, remounting the neck to fall, which she first presented at Dance in Vancouver in 2013, and which I have previously written about here. The piece's movement has changed over time, as has Kwan's costume (I recall a black suit and heels from the premiere). But the core set of objects with which Kwan interacts remain; these include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which she sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Kwan at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee's wonderful musical score. Each object anchors a set of external commands (delivered by a recorded Asian female voice) against which Kwan struggles to adapt her body, the piece being as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the pioneering work of somatic practitioner Amelia Itcush.
The second piece on the program was The Biting School's Helmeat. To the pounding beat of the classic song "War: What Is It Good For?," the curtain opens upon Aryo Kkakpour kneeling at the downstage edge of a red-taped square; he wears a red jumpsuit reminiscent of prison garb and wrapped around his head is a turban of tinfoil. At a certain point Khakpour unplugs the cable of the speaker to his right and the music stops; he begins to methodically lay out tiny squares of tin foil in a grid just on the other side of the downstage edge of the red tape. Retreating upstage and calling for the lights to dim, the next thing we see is Khakpour rolling about the stage, crushing the tinfoil atop his head into a face-masking silvery balaclava, minus the eye and mouth holes; thus blinded our hero staggers about his enclosure, feeling his way from object to object (two stacks of wrapped helmets upstage, a full-length mirror, a shopping cart, and that speaker) via the tape on the floor. However, the signature moment in the piece must surely be the extended bit of coitus that Khakpour engages in with the shopping cart, grinding his pelvis into its handle as he slowly positions it in front of the mirror. Climbing in, he takes out a kazoo and proceeds to hum out the tune to "The Ride of the Valkyries." The piece concludes with Khakpour turning over an actual helmet to reveal a mess of hamburger meat inside. Telling us that this is what we've been waiting for, he then proceeds to roll the ground beef into individual meatballs, which he slowly and deliberately places upon the squares of tinfoil from the top of the show. While this is happening, Arash Khakpour--Aryo's brother and the other half of The Biting School--emerges from the wings and begins striking the set. The link established by the two brothers between consumerism, petroleum products and war might seem a bit obvious were it not for the charisma of Aryo as a performer. He commits utterly to everything he does and so is eminently watchable. In turn, the strangeness of the world that he and Arash create, in which everyday objects and tasks are turned into exceptional and even alienating phenomena, reminds us of how thoroughly we have internalized war into our daily diet.
Finally, the evening concluded with a short excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's work-in-progress, I can't remember the word for I can't remember, a collaboration with local actor/writer/director John Murphy. Loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee, Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience before climbing into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeding to pick invisible gnats out of his hair. Already we are putty in her hilarious hands. After a short blackout, Friedenberg stands fully upright centre stage in a square of white light. She launches into a monologue, or at least one side of two potential dialgogues, about how she can't remember with whom she was having a conversation. This theme of waning memory, linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload (who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks), alternates with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting, there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things (or people) we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion at this point which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes. And that each has bodily effects--which she ably demonstrates through a series of physical scores that accompany her text. I look forward to how text and movement evolve together in this piece as Friedenberg and Murphy continue with its development.
P
First up was dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, remounting the neck to fall, which she first presented at Dance in Vancouver in 2013, and which I have previously written about here. The piece's movement has changed over time, as has Kwan's costume (I recall a black suit and heels from the premiere). But the core set of objects with which Kwan interacts remain; these include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which she sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Kwan at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee's wonderful musical score. Each object anchors a set of external commands (delivered by a recorded Asian female voice) against which Kwan struggles to adapt her body, the piece being as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the pioneering work of somatic practitioner Amelia Itcush.
The second piece on the program was The Biting School's Helmeat. To the pounding beat of the classic song "War: What Is It Good For?," the curtain opens upon Aryo Kkakpour kneeling at the downstage edge of a red-taped square; he wears a red jumpsuit reminiscent of prison garb and wrapped around his head is a turban of tinfoil. At a certain point Khakpour unplugs the cable of the speaker to his right and the music stops; he begins to methodically lay out tiny squares of tin foil in a grid just on the other side of the downstage edge of the red tape. Retreating upstage and calling for the lights to dim, the next thing we see is Khakpour rolling about the stage, crushing the tinfoil atop his head into a face-masking silvery balaclava, minus the eye and mouth holes; thus blinded our hero staggers about his enclosure, feeling his way from object to object (two stacks of wrapped helmets upstage, a full-length mirror, a shopping cart, and that speaker) via the tape on the floor. However, the signature moment in the piece must surely be the extended bit of coitus that Khakpour engages in with the shopping cart, grinding his pelvis into its handle as he slowly positions it in front of the mirror. Climbing in, he takes out a kazoo and proceeds to hum out the tune to "The Ride of the Valkyries." The piece concludes with Khakpour turning over an actual helmet to reveal a mess of hamburger meat inside. Telling us that this is what we've been waiting for, he then proceeds to roll the ground beef into individual meatballs, which he slowly and deliberately places upon the squares of tinfoil from the top of the show. While this is happening, Arash Khakpour--Aryo's brother and the other half of The Biting School--emerges from the wings and begins striking the set. The link established by the two brothers between consumerism, petroleum products and war might seem a bit obvious were it not for the charisma of Aryo as a performer. He commits utterly to everything he does and so is eminently watchable. In turn, the strangeness of the world that he and Arash create, in which everyday objects and tasks are turned into exceptional and even alienating phenomena, reminds us of how thoroughly we have internalized war into our daily diet.
Finally, the evening concluded with a short excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's work-in-progress, I can't remember the word for I can't remember, a collaboration with local actor/writer/director John Murphy. Loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee, Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience before climbing into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeding to pick invisible gnats out of his hair. Already we are putty in her hilarious hands. After a short blackout, Friedenberg stands fully upright centre stage in a square of white light. She launches into a monologue, or at least one side of two potential dialgogues, about how she can't remember with whom she was having a conversation. This theme of waning memory, linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload (who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks), alternates with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting, there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things (or people) we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion at this point which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes. And that each has bodily effects--which she ably demonstrates through a series of physical scores that accompany her text. I look forward to how text and movement evolve together in this piece as Friedenberg and Murphy continue with its development.
P
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Foreign Radical at the Cultch
Given the choice, would you rather have the freedom to assemble and associate with whomever you please OR the freedom to travel internationally? Such is the final question posed to audience members in Theatre Conspiracy's new show, Foreign Radical, on at the Vancity Culture Lab through next Saturday. But before we answer this question--and answer we must--we are tasked with making a series of other, equally complex and ethically challenging decisions.
Not only do these decisions have very immediate and real consequences for us within the conceptual parameters of the show (including being assembled into different groups based on our choices, or ushered mysteriously into different rooms), but also, we are led to believe, for Hesam (Aryo Khakpour), the alleged radical of the title, and detained under the auspices of a government watch list for being a suspected terrorist. Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, because the show is immersive and interactive we must make our split-second decisions not just under the watchful eye of our genial host (Milton Lim), but also in front of each other. It is one thing to respond to a series of ethical prompts anonymously as part of a darkened proscenium audience by typing our answers into a video game console, as with Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, which ran at the Cultch in 2010 in a commission by the PuSh Festival. Theatre Conspiracy Artistic Director and Foreign Radical writer Tim Carlson, who has been very influenced by Rimini's particular brand of locally-inflected participatory theatre (he also worked on their 2011 production of 100% Vancouver), here ramps up the stakes by literally exposing the processes of data collection through which governments and corporations group us into good or bad citizens, good or bad consumers. We are not wont to think about such things when the interface is just us and our computer screen (as is the case as I type these words, with Google blogger no doubt tracking my every key stroke); however, faced with the embodied scrutiny of 15 other pairs of eyes, we may think twice about how we answer questions like whether or not we've viewed pornography in the last 24 hours; whether we regularly change our online passwords; if we've ever lied to security agents at the border.
Add to this the fact that based on our answers to the questions posed by our Host during this central section of the show we are then marshalled into different taped-off quadrants or opposing sides of the room, and one begins to understand how self-consciousness and second guessing based on where and beside whom folks end up standing becomes an added variable in this part of the show. Indeed, twice after a sequence of shufflings of bodies based on a succession of narrower and narrower questions the entire audience is then asked to identify among the assembled participants in one particular quadrant who looks the most paranoid (in our case, Elise) and who the most suspicious (Colin, though for a while it looked like it might be me). Because our ebullient and maximally energetic Host (who is played with an abundance of slick charm by Lim) presents all of this in the manner of a game show, we are somewhat seduced into treating this as all a bit of benign fun. However, things got really serious for me when we were showed four satirical Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons and had to choose one based on whether we found it the most offensive or the most funny. Easy enough if you can keep that choice to yourself. But when you have to not only move to a specific square based on that choice AND raise a colour-coded card identifying whether you found your cartoon funny or offensive, then, necessarily, you start to view your fellow audience members in a different light. It is in this way that Foreign Radical becomes much more than a simple agitprop indictment of surveillance culture and the contemporary security state. Carlson and his collaborators, including director Jeremy Waller (who participated with us as an audience member), strip the operations of ideology down to the level of the body: are you like me or not like me; are you with me or against me; do you share my values or not? Clap for yes; don't clap for no. It's a measure of how quickly this show got under my skin that, with each question posed, I was counting the claps.
Parallel to the audience's self-scrutiny, there is our judgment of Hesam, whose naked body, bent over a steel interrogation table, we encounter immediately upon entering the first room of the performance space (there are four of them in total). Several of us will reencounter him again, this time with his back strapped horizontally over the side of the table, his face upside down, denouncing our presence before him, telling us that, among other things, he would like to vomit in all of our faces. When Khakpour released his long arms from where they have been pinioned underneath the table, I winced, and it is sign of the actor's amazing kinaesthetic presence that even in those scenes where he is not speaking--of which there are several--I nevertheless felt something palpable (dignity, rage, resignation, despair, even a quiet joy) being communicated to me.
This, then, is the central paradox of Foreign Radical. Face to face with a body in pain, a body unlawfully and perhaps unjustly detained, we empathize with the person before us. But abstracted as data mined from different intelligence-gathering sources and the so-called forensic evidence found in his suitcase (plans in Arabic to build a bomb, anti-psychotic medication, boxcutters), we sit in cold judgment of the same body: is he a terrorist or not? The climax of the piece is a debate between audience members on this very topic. I was the spokesperson for the "con" side, and I'm pleased to say that we won the debate. Not that I take much comfort from that. For, if I'd answered the questions leading up to that point differently--or if the questions themselves had been different--I might have ended up on the other side.
The show ends with Hesam/Khakpour (he is both in and out of character at this point), accompanied by our ever-present Host, turning the tables and interrogating, or rather conversing with, two among us. This is done against a dually projected backdrop of a wide open expanse of desert plain and blue horizon. We have arrived at that final question about the freedom of collective assembly vs. the freedom of individual travel. The interrogations finish, the actors leave, and a door is opened. No instruction is given, but we are presented with one last choice. Do we leave one-by-one, or linger with the rest of the group to reflect on what we have just witnessed?
A suitably subtle ending to a very thoughtful show.
P.
Not only do these decisions have very immediate and real consequences for us within the conceptual parameters of the show (including being assembled into different groups based on our choices, or ushered mysteriously into different rooms), but also, we are led to believe, for Hesam (Aryo Khakpour), the alleged radical of the title, and detained under the auspices of a government watch list for being a suspected terrorist. Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, because the show is immersive and interactive we must make our split-second decisions not just under the watchful eye of our genial host (Milton Lim), but also in front of each other. It is one thing to respond to a series of ethical prompts anonymously as part of a darkened proscenium audience by typing our answers into a video game console, as with Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, which ran at the Cultch in 2010 in a commission by the PuSh Festival. Theatre Conspiracy Artistic Director and Foreign Radical writer Tim Carlson, who has been very influenced by Rimini's particular brand of locally-inflected participatory theatre (he also worked on their 2011 production of 100% Vancouver), here ramps up the stakes by literally exposing the processes of data collection through which governments and corporations group us into good or bad citizens, good or bad consumers. We are not wont to think about such things when the interface is just us and our computer screen (as is the case as I type these words, with Google blogger no doubt tracking my every key stroke); however, faced with the embodied scrutiny of 15 other pairs of eyes, we may think twice about how we answer questions like whether or not we've viewed pornography in the last 24 hours; whether we regularly change our online passwords; if we've ever lied to security agents at the border.
Add to this the fact that based on our answers to the questions posed by our Host during this central section of the show we are then marshalled into different taped-off quadrants or opposing sides of the room, and one begins to understand how self-consciousness and second guessing based on where and beside whom folks end up standing becomes an added variable in this part of the show. Indeed, twice after a sequence of shufflings of bodies based on a succession of narrower and narrower questions the entire audience is then asked to identify among the assembled participants in one particular quadrant who looks the most paranoid (in our case, Elise) and who the most suspicious (Colin, though for a while it looked like it might be me). Because our ebullient and maximally energetic Host (who is played with an abundance of slick charm by Lim) presents all of this in the manner of a game show, we are somewhat seduced into treating this as all a bit of benign fun. However, things got really serious for me when we were showed four satirical Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons and had to choose one based on whether we found it the most offensive or the most funny. Easy enough if you can keep that choice to yourself. But when you have to not only move to a specific square based on that choice AND raise a colour-coded card identifying whether you found your cartoon funny or offensive, then, necessarily, you start to view your fellow audience members in a different light. It is in this way that Foreign Radical becomes much more than a simple agitprop indictment of surveillance culture and the contemporary security state. Carlson and his collaborators, including director Jeremy Waller (who participated with us as an audience member), strip the operations of ideology down to the level of the body: are you like me or not like me; are you with me or against me; do you share my values or not? Clap for yes; don't clap for no. It's a measure of how quickly this show got under my skin that, with each question posed, I was counting the claps.
Parallel to the audience's self-scrutiny, there is our judgment of Hesam, whose naked body, bent over a steel interrogation table, we encounter immediately upon entering the first room of the performance space (there are four of them in total). Several of us will reencounter him again, this time with his back strapped horizontally over the side of the table, his face upside down, denouncing our presence before him, telling us that, among other things, he would like to vomit in all of our faces. When Khakpour released his long arms from where they have been pinioned underneath the table, I winced, and it is sign of the actor's amazing kinaesthetic presence that even in those scenes where he is not speaking--of which there are several--I nevertheless felt something palpable (dignity, rage, resignation, despair, even a quiet joy) being communicated to me.
This, then, is the central paradox of Foreign Radical. Face to face with a body in pain, a body unlawfully and perhaps unjustly detained, we empathize with the person before us. But abstracted as data mined from different intelligence-gathering sources and the so-called forensic evidence found in his suitcase (plans in Arabic to build a bomb, anti-psychotic medication, boxcutters), we sit in cold judgment of the same body: is he a terrorist or not? The climax of the piece is a debate between audience members on this very topic. I was the spokesperson for the "con" side, and I'm pleased to say that we won the debate. Not that I take much comfort from that. For, if I'd answered the questions leading up to that point differently--or if the questions themselves had been different--I might have ended up on the other side.
The show ends with Hesam/Khakpour (he is both in and out of character at this point), accompanied by our ever-present Host, turning the tables and interrogating, or rather conversing with, two among us. This is done against a dually projected backdrop of a wide open expanse of desert plain and blue horizon. We have arrived at that final question about the freedom of collective assembly vs. the freedom of individual travel. The interrogations finish, the actors leave, and a door is opened. No instruction is given, but we are presented with one last choice. Do we leave one-by-one, or linger with the rest of the group to reflect on what we have just witnessed?
A suitably subtle ending to a very thoughtful show.
P.
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